What is “pkg-resources==0.0.0” in output of pip freeze command

Question

When I run pip freeze I see (among other expected packages) pkg-resources==0.0.0. I have seen a few posts mentioning this package (including this o

Answer 1

As for the part of your question "is it OK to remove this line?":

I have the same issue here developing on an ubuntu 16.04 with that very line in the requirements. When deploying on a debian 8.5 running "pip install -r requirements.txt" pip complains that pkg-resources is "not found" but there is a global package installed "python-pkg-resources" so the dependency should be satisfied. Same on ubuntu: The package exists there as well.

As stated here it seems to be some "implicitly installed package".

So: If you are on a Debian/Ubuntu having python-pkg-resources installed it should be safe to remove that line. I did so and everything is running fine. However since I am no expert on this you should keep in mind that this might lead to complications when deploying on another machine.